Ironist and Moralist: The Two Readers of Tom Jones

Abstract

Ironist and Moralist: The Two Readers of Tom Jones WILLIAM PARK Commenting on William Empson’s essay “Tom Jones,” C. J. Rawson remarked that “the overall effect of the essay is misleading... in so far as it suggests that the main doctrinal points are made by means of an essentially evasive irony rather than by what is often an em­ phatic explicitness.”1 Rawson was speaking of sexual morality, and perhaps we have all come into complete agreement on that subject. Yet on another “doctrinal” point—the relationship between the plot of the novel and a providential design—there have appeared in recent years two contradictory and opposed readings. On the one hand we find Ian Watt, Martin Battestin, Aubrey Williams, and Henry Knight Miller, who see the well-ordered plot as being somehow related to Fielding’s vision of a well-ordered universe.2 As Watt says, the plot “reflects the general literary strategy of neoclas­ sicism; just as the creation of a field of force makes visible the universal law of magnetism, so the supreme task of the writer was to make visible in the human scene the operations of universal order.”3 On the other hand we discover Sheridan Baker, John Preston, Leo Braudy, and David Goldknopf, who see the plot as an artifice, a kind of irony, a recognition of confusion, or a failure having no real significance in itself but possibly working as an aesthetic device that enables Fielding 233 234 / WILLIAM PARK to achieve other ends.4 According to Braudy, “In Tom Jones Fielding asserts that the most obvious and artificial structure (the plot) is also the most liberating. Because it does not claim to be necessary, it therefore allows the material the freest play and gives the truest and most relevant representation of life. ” Braudy further claims that since only the Man of the Hill, Partridge, and Blifil believe in Providence, “the providential view in Tom Jones is at best supererogatory and at worst ignorantly or meretriciously self serving.”5 I believe this conflict may to some extent be resolved if we return to Empson’s concept of “double irony” in Fielding and the two readers which that irony involves.6 According to Empson, Fielding poses as the man of the world, the one who winks tolerantly at sexual mis­ behavior. This is his first irony, made at the expense of stuffy moralists. The second irony, however, trips up the worldly reader when either chastity or sexual license no longer appears to be a joke. Thus Fielding moves closer to a Richardsonian view, though one which has become highly qualified. Now I would argue that the plot ofTom Jones is one double irony.7 As narrator, Fielding on numerous occasions insists that the world is governed by accident and Fortune, that virtue is not rewarded by happiness in this world (XV, i), and that he will not intervene to help Tom (XVII, i). He appeals directly to the realist like Braudy and seems to be laughing at the theologically orthodox like Battestin. As he says, he is confined to “natural Means alone” (XVII, i).8 At first, the hodgepodge of events seems to support this first irony, but as order and happiness begin to emerge out of the random and episodic world, as Tom’s fortunes are reversed, the comic action contradicts this particu­ lar narrative viewpoint and reveals the second irony, namely that Fortune is but Providence improperly understood. At this point the realist who accepted all the statements about chance, accident, For­ tune, and history as absolute has been revealed to be as literal-minded as his moralistic counterpart. By a careful counterpoint between statement about the plot and the plot itself, Fielding has by the last book reversed his initial position; and as he withdraws from direct commentary, the novel as a whole affirms an orthodoxy which be­ comes more interesting and acceptable than the simpleminded version preached by the prigs. Instead of talking about the plot ofTom Jones as Two Readers of Tom Jones / 235 an artifice, then, it might be more appropriate to notice how Fielding’s pretense at being a naturalistic narrator is an even greater artifice...